One Note
In the night he played the organ of sorrows
whose vast pipes spanned continents
and whose music was time, the sea
in which he swam and dissolved
to become a wail sounding the deep
where beginning and end are one note
All At Once
The cat
licks her paw
to a Beethoven
piano sonata
then lowers her cheek
and goes to sleep
I sit and wrestle
with my strangeness
I am and am not
all at once
and the piano
keeps on playing
An Undeclared Mystic
Strange anything at all exists.
What is, is!
Profound tautology,
but I can’t find a curtain to pull
to let me see behind “is”
Wittgenstein snorts like an impatient horse,
“Haven’t you ever heard of getting snared in a language game?”
This is the form fashionable in the West
of what in Indo-Persian lore once was called a “tilism” *
a magical landscape that can pass for real and hold you
for a very long time, even your whole life.
A substantial part of the beam of my attention,
is always held in wonder that a pen can be, that I am,
that a green shirt can be, that light and robins can be…
I’m dazed by what other people take for granted.
I’m a child or a fool or both mixed up together.
The wonder of water and palm trees and the blue of sky
And dark and stars and the ever unrolling scroll of dreams.
I admit it: I’ve been lost all my life and this
is where I’ve lived and this is who I’ve been
An undeclared mystic
*See the “Adventures of Amir Hamza”
Bare Bones
too much to read,
much too much to read
I watch the leaves
falling from the trees
like words from the pages
of books the sun has written
I, too, am a book
that the sun has written
winter will be soon
and white and cold
I’ve lost track of what
I once may have known
I’m like that oak
becoming naked
I’ve lost track of most
of my questions
they’ve fallen from me
like leaves from a tree
I keep on reading
my way beyond me
I am the bare bones
of who I once was
Enantiomers
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza
enantiomers of a single compound
the right handed version
and the left handed version
the same in chemical composition
but breaking light differently
Myself, I’m a racemic mixture,
Don and Sancho, inseparable
Words For Waves
Words For Waves
If I were to compose words for waves,
I’d wander the shore, mile after mile, month after month
year after year as I changed ages, letting
the sun set on me and the moon rise on me
sometimes a scimitar, sometimes a golden eye,
and the stars stick their fierce pins into the sky,
letting the sun rise pink again on my pink flesh
I’d wander the shore and let my feet
be familiar of the wear of sand and of rock,
listening, listening, listening, for I’m certain
that the waves have a language all their own,
a way of speaking and making themselves understood
and I have always aspired to be their translator.
the importer of their ancient virgin truth
I’d leave the clouds to others, even though cloud
and waves are intimately connected as both are water
I’d leave the land, too, its vast barrens, and strange hewn
grotesque overweening ranges of mountains all to others
I’d keep my feet walking, listening, listening, listening
for the hint of a word in the thunder rumble
of huge breakers minted on the open ocean
Or perhaps it would be the fan of surf spray
that betrayed a clue in a random moment, a first word
confident of what came after though yet without form
the waves are connected to the deep, to the hidden skin
of the earth that was once surface, perhaps, then dove deep
into a soothing darkness, an immense quiet, a place to wait
and keep on waiting for whatever might come next
But suppose, after all my walking, all my wandering,
all my wondering, that the language of the waves
does not yield to me: what’s the harm in that, I love
to walk and to wander and to wonder and to take wind
on my cheek as I go and feel the flecks of salt it holds.
suppose the waves keep their secrets and exult in them,
then what a quest I’ve had when at last I crash and break
In My Appointment Book
In my appointment book, in my own handwriting,
the obligatory medical illegible scrawl, a notation,
for 1:30 PM October 10, 2011, Columbus Day, only
I can not read it. I discern something like M__id___,
but can not attach a name to this awkward rune
At 1:30 PM October 10, 2011, Columbus Day, I wait
eagerly for help in deciphering my own scrawl
to arrive in the form of a particular patient, solution
in the flesh to the mystery I have made for myself,
but no one, no one at all comes and mystery deepens
It is an unknown no one who comes, who fails me
in unraveling the knot I have tied for myself, the “not”
with which I have filled this particular time slot.
In more than a quarter century of practice I’ve not
done the like, never invented such a loose end.
Old Maps
When I was six, open air book stalls along the banks
of the gray green Seine, sold old maps, exotic, all fake,
that fascinated me for whom they were the genuine
doorways to an imaginary geography, the presence
of other places much more interesting than here
My father tolerated the spell I was under with mixed
indulgence and disdain, he let me look and look
and look and ask questions – “What language is this?”
“Do ships still sail here?” Does this island still exist?
“Why not?” he would ask, puffing out white smoke
Despite many trips, despite my yearning for these
talismans of voyages, despite hours spent looking,
spent comparing, spent investigating, we never
bought one of these maps, which made them ever
more precious, lodged as they were deep in my mind
Not only much older now than I was then, but much
older now than my father was then, I hold it all
as something ordinary, imperfect, yet magical,
the way we were together then along the banks
of the gray green Seine, as I imagined myself
Your Mother
Your mother
whom you hardly knew
whether she withdrew just after your birth
or died before you were two or twenty
or forty or fifty-four or even sixty or more
she gave you so much of you
but was the origin of riddles
even if you know yourself as a riddle
your fingers can’t reach out and brush
who she was, what she meant, what she held
I know there are vast rivers of sentiment
that run in the other direction
celebrating unions however imperfect,
exalting mother and child together
I can’t help that I stand for the truth
of a lonelier life, one full of destinations
we never reach whether by the sea
or in the vast unsettling interior
Beyond Dreaming
I want to dream beyond dreaming,
to be convinced by worlds that exist only
inside me like pearl planets inside oysters of sleep
tethered to the flickering electrical reefs
that invent me both when I’m snoring and when I’m awake
who can dive for these pearl planets, bring oysters
back to the surface for examination, for interrogation,
so that they can be asked to state what they might know
about their circumstances, about my own circumstances,
how we’re all accidental, even if round and smooth?
the border of dream is not waking,
not a line of fence posts and barbed wire
or even wishing with all its exotic barbs,
the border of dream is hard to reach because
dream keeps springing up under all feet, five toed, poetic
nor is there any going back to the beginning,
when I dreamt I had arrived at origin, suddenly
a wild buffalo appeared and I had to run for my life,
humiliated that what I thought was an idyll was
instead something so other and in sleep that was mine
I want to get in my dreams beyond seeking approval,
beyond asking acceptance, even my own, beyond trying
to amount to someone, but just to float and glow like
tiny phosphorescent plankton awaiting the whale’s maw,
but without knowing that they are awaiting…
In my thinking about my dreaming, how it is satisfactory
and unsatisfactory, there is more than a hint of jazz,
of improvisation, of never putting my tongue in the same
stream of mind twice, even when I want to and when I try,
it’s no dream I’m always finding and losing myself, all ways